11/7/11

Today was a frustrating day if you were bearish like me.

This count is a possibility.  I have no real clue what the count currently is; even the bullish counts leave something to be desired.  One potential is simply that the market is behaving as a fractal of the early part of this decline, where the move from 1074 to 1292 is equivalent to the move from 1258 to 1356, and so on.  As an impulse, this move up from 1215 looks rather like crap.  Doesn't mean it can't be an impulse, but...

I was curious, since many of the stocks I semi-follow didn't seem to be joining the party, what was up:  AAPL gapped down slightly and didn't fill intraday, BAC gapped down, filled immediately, then tanked to a lower low than Nov. 1.  CMG, LULU, CROX were all rather tepid - in fact if you followed CROX only you hardly would have known the SPX rallied.

Then I decided to look at the sector ETFs, i.e. the XL* were * is a letter.

• Financials (XLF):  Closed up, but not at HOD
• Energy (XLE):  Closed up, but not at HOD
• Consumer Discretionary (XLY): Closed up, but not at HOD
• Industrials (XLI): Closed up, but not at HOD; also only closed marginally up
• Materials (XLB): Closed up, but not at HOD
• Technology (XLK): Closed up and at ~HOD - significant morning decline and afternoon rally
• Utilities (XLU):  Closed up and at ~HOD - significant morning decline and afternoon rally
• Health care (XLV): Closed up and at ~HOD - significant morning decline and afternoon rally
• Consumer Staples (XLP): Closed up and at ~HOD - strong afternoon rally; weak morning decline

I'd overall have to say consumer staples played a big part in this.  Same goes for utilities and health care, which are also rather "mandatory" expenditures.  And then of course technology, but it seems odd that AAPL didn't really join in.  MSFT and GOOG seemed to have pretty strong afternoon rallies.